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I miss thinking hard

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#471

Post by dysoco »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #460

I'm wondering if everyone here saying they think harder with LLM agents have never reached "flow state" while programming. I just can't imagine using 100% of my mental focus state for hours with an agent. Sure, I think differently when my coding is primarily via agent, but I've never been totally enveloped by my thoughts while doing so. For those who have found a "flow state" with LLM agents, what's that like?

I believe you can enter "flow state" with something like Claude Code, from what I've read, but it's mostly reduced to pressing 1 or 2 and typing a few prompts. The reward loop is much more closed now though, so it's a bit more akin to reaching flow state playing Tetris.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#472

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

gyomu wrote: post #32

This March 2025 post from Aral Balkan stuck with me: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114160190826192080 "Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about wha…

In 30 years across 10 jobs, the companies I’ve worked for have not paid me to “code”. They’ve paid me to use my experience to add more business value than the total cost of employing me.

I’m no less proud of what I built in the last three weeks using three terminal sessions - one with codex, one with Claude, and one testing everything from carefully designed specs - than I was when I first booted a computer, did “call -151” to get to the assembly language prompt on my Apple //e in 1986.

The goal then was to see my ideas come to life. The goal now is to keep my customers happy, get projects done on time, on budget and meets requirements and continue to have my employer put cash in my account twice a month - and formerly put AMZN stock in my brokerage account at vesting.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#473

Post by koliber »

bayindirh wrote: post #422
koliber wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes you want an artistic vase that captures some essential element of beauty, culture, or emotion. Sometimes you want a utilitarian teapot to reliably pour a cup of tea. The materials and rough process for each can be very similar. One takes a master craftsman and a lot of time to make and costs a lot of money. The other can be made on a production line and the cost is tiny. Both have are desirable, for differe…

> Sometimes you want a utilitarian teapot to reliably pour a cup of tea. If you pardon the analogy, watch how Japanese make a utilitarian teapot which reliably pours a cup of tea. It's more complicated and skill-intensive than it looks. In both realms, making an artistic vase can be simpler than a simple utilitarian tool. AI is good at making (poor quality, arguably) artistic vases via its stochastic output, not high…

There is a whole range of variants in between those two "artistic vs utilitarian" points. Additionally, there is a ton of variance around "artistic" vs "utilitarian".

Artisans in Japan might go to incredible lengths to create utilitarian teapots. Artisans who graduated last week from a 4-week pottery workshop will produce a different kind quality, albeit artisan. $5.00 teapots from an East Asian mass production factory will be very different than high quality mass-produced upmarket teapots at a higher price. I have things in my house that fall into each of those categories (not all teapots, but different kinds of wares).

Sometimes commercial manufacturing produces worse tolerances than hand-crafting. Sometimes, commercial manufacturing is the only way to get humanly unachievable tolerances.

You can't simplify it into "always" and "never" absolutes. Artisan is not always nicer than commercial. Commercial is not always cheaper than artisan. _____ is not always _____ than ____.

If we bring it back to AI, I've seen it produce crap, and I've also seen it produce code that honestly impressed me (my opinion is based on 24 years of coding and engineering management experience). I am reluctant to make a call where it falls on that axis that we've sketched out in this message thread.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#474

Post by rogerkirkness »

alexpotato wrote: post #470

I'm a DevOps/SRE and I've spent the past couple weeks trying to vibecode as much of what I do as possible. In some ways, it's magical. e.g. I whipped up a web based tool for analyzing performance statistics of a blockchain. Claude was able to do everything from building the gui, optimizing the queries, adding new indices to the database etc. I broke it down into small prompts so that I kept it on track and it didn't…

I think there's an argument where if Claude had the knowledge map of your personal one liners and a tool for using them, it would often do the right thing in those cases. But it's definitely not as able to compress all the entropy of 'what can go wrong' operations wise as it is when composing code yet.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#475

Post by Trasmatta »

socalgal2 wrote: post #261
gyomu wrote: post #32

This March 2025 post from Aral Balkan stuck with me: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114160190826192080 "Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about wha…

To me it's all abstraction. I didn't write my own OS. I didn't write my own compiler. I didn't write the standard library. I just use them. I could write them but I'm happy to work on the new thing that uses what's already there. This is no different than many things. I could grow a tree and cut it into wood but I don't. I could buy wood and nails and brackets and make furniture but I don't. I instead just fill my ho…

Did you not read the post? You're talking from the space of the Builder while neglecting the Thinker. That's fine for some people, but not for others.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#476

Post by William_BB »

abm53 wrote: post #223
nunez wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You _think_ you're thinking as hard. Reading code != writing it. Just like watching someone do a thing isn't the same as actually doing it.

Correct… reading code is a much more difficult and ultimately, productive, task. I suspect those using the tools in the best way are thinking harder than ever for this reason.

Sure. Reading a book is a much more difficult and ultimately, productive, task than writing a book.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#477

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

alexpotato wrote: post #470

I'm a DevOps/SRE and I've spent the past couple weeks trying to vibecode as much of what I do as possible. In some ways, it's magical. e.g. I whipped up a web based tool for analyzing performance statistics of a blockchain. Claude was able to do everything from building the gui, optimizing the queries, adding new indices to the database etc. I broke it down into small prompts so that I kept it on track and it didn't…

My experience that with careful specs, Claude or Codex can whip up either CDK, Cloudformation, or Terraform code much quicker than I can and I’ve been using IAC for 8 years - developer/consultant specializing in development + cloud architecture

Re: I miss thinking hard

#478

Post by duskdozer »

w4yai wrote: post #299
duskdozer wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that LLM output is very nondeterministic.

It depends. Temperature is a variable. If you really need determinism, you could build a LLM for that. Non-determinism can be a good feature though.

How would you do that? If it's possible, it seems strange that someone hasn't done it already.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#479

Post by nasretdinov »

electsaudit0q wrote: post #449

[dead]

That reminds me of why I don't think that if err != nil in Go is actually a problem, because while it's annoying to have to pause each time an error can happen, it's actually very useful, because it forces you to consider all the possible failure states and it often lets you discover the flaws in your original design while you're typing in the code. This eventually leads to much better outcomes and allows for the tools I write to be much more resilient than they otherwise would.

Obviously it all goes out of the window as soon as AI coding comes into question, and that's why I learned that I actually _don't_ want AI to generate code for me. I would only ask it simple questions like "how do I do X in Go" or in some other system, but the implementation I do myself, otherwise I lose this "having to consider every error path" part, which is apparently very helpful when your goal is to write resilient software

Re: I miss thinking hard

#480

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

monch1962 wrote: post #142

As someone who's been coding for several decades now (i.e. I'm old), I find the current generation of AI tools very ... freeing. As an industry, we've been preaching the benefits of running lots of small experiments to see what works vs what doesn't, try out different approaches to implementing features, and so on. Pre-AI, lots of these ideas never got implemented because they'd take too much time for no definitive b…

Exactly, it kills me to see a people a lot younger (I’m 51) pining about the good old days while the coding part of my day to day life now is using AI tools to their fullest extent.
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